Page - 249 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

Subsequently, we were acquired by a publicly traded company at a price of several million dollars per employee. One of the reasonswe received such a high price per engineer (and a ridiculous multiplication of revenue) was that, within a week, my non-communicative engineer solved a problem the acquiring company had been working on for six months without any results. Our superstar engineer delivered a working code that got the firm’s algorithm to operate to a critical In ternet security standard. Getting engineers with that level of talent can be very valuable, andwewere lucky to have had several of them. Asmentioned above, acquiring talent is not enough; youmust then keep it. The acquiring company had a very different management style from ours. Their command-and-control style assumed that top management knew what was best. Twoyears later, noneof our former employeeswere stillworking for the company that acquired us. I heard about some of what happened when they tried their hierarchical man- agement style on our self-motivated talent. It was difficult to get my former employees to stay long enough to cash in their stock options. Notknowinghowtonurtureandsupport talenteddigital intrapreneursmakes the strategy of acquiring them useless. The same principle applies to home-grown talent. Jobsof routineprocessingaregraduallydisappearing, either becoming taken over by smartmachinesor getting shipped to low-wage countries. Increasingly, the jobs that remain require creativity and care—things atwhich people are still better thanmachines. Creativity and care must come from the inside. You cannot force someone to care for their customers, since themotivation to care about themmust come from the inside. As Daniel Pink points out, the same applies to creativity (TED 2009). Even rewards reduce creativity by shifting themind fromwhat psychologists call intrinsic forms ofmotivation to the extrinsic ones. The emerging kinds ofwork in the twenty-first century is similar to intrapreneuringand is thus inneedofmanagers who behavemore like sponsors than conventional supervisors. This is particularly true of digital employees. Coders, for example, must make instantaneous decisions on how to structure their code and what path to take to achieve thedesired result.Todo thatwell, theymust focusentirelyon their intrinsic motivationandenter a state offlow.Theyneed tobemotivatedby their ownvalues instead of worrying about what their boss might think. That is whymy superstar engineer askedmenot to talk tohimduring theday.Hewanted tobemotivatedby caring about what hewas doing, by his own sense ofwhat was right and elegant, andnot by theopinionofhis bosswhodidnot reallyunderstandhis code.That is a lesson for anyone who must manage digital talent. If you have hired the right people, theyknowmore aboutwhat theyaredoing thanyoudo. If you respect that, theymight stay. Case study 3: The School for Intrapreneurs™ This case is about an online action-learning programme at a global company, which, in one year, produced a ten-to-one return and provided a proof of concept that digital intrapreneurship couldyield rapidprofitable results.Quickwins and the 256 G. Pinchot III andM. Soltanifar